Gay Tourism

Culture and Context

Gordon Waitt, Kevin Markwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136783371
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The gay tourism industrya progressive social force or a pull towards an oppressive status quo?

The pink tourism dollar is now recognized as a highly profitable niche of the tourism market. Gay Tourism: Culture and Context critically investigates the emergence of a commercial gay tourism industry for male clients, the way it is organized, and how the tourism industry promotes cities, resorts, and nations as 'gay' destinations. This careful examination critically questions the social, political, and cultural implications regarding relationships between gay tourism, Western gay male culture, the erotic, sexual politics, and sexual diversity.

Gay Tourism: Culture and Context begins by detailing how travel often enabled the expression of Western same-sex male desire in the nineteenth century and then charts the
emergence of a Western gay tourism industry in the late twentieth century. A critical analysis is given of gay guidebooks and erotic videos that help to establish and maintain destinations as seemingly gay utopias, including Hawaii and the Greek island Mykonos. Carefull consideration
as to debates about how the gay tourism industry operates in the context of questions regarding the globalization of sexuality, sexual citizenship and place-marketing of (homo)sexualised cities. The text includes an extensive bibliography plus several photographs, charts, and figures to
clearly present concepts and ideas.

Topics in Gay Tourism: Culture and Context include:

• the history of gay travel and tourism
  
• the effect of HIV/AIDS on gay tourist destinations
  
• gay travel writing sustaining same-sex fantasies about popular gay tourist destinations
  
• analysis of the socio-political ramifications of gay tourism
  
• the sexual politics of a heterosexual nation
  
• gay tourists as an invading force of corruption
  
• the economic rationale for the (homo)sexualized city
  
• the concept of gay villages
  
• the role of special events and festivals in gay tourism
  
• and many more!

Gay Tourism: Culture and Context is enlightening reading for tourism policymakers, tourism planners, tourism managers, and teachers and students in the fields of tourism studies, gay studies, social and cultural geography, and sociology.

Chapter 1

Mapping the Terrain of Gay Tourism

Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,”

lyrics by E. Harburg, music by H. Arlen,

The Wizard of Oz, 1939

Introduction

Unhappy on her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry’s farm in Middle America, eleven-year-old Dorothy Gale yearned to travel “somewhere over the rainbow.” Little did she realize, as she sang this song, that she would soon travel quite some distance courtesy of a powerful tornado that would sweep her and her dog, Toto, far away from Kansas and into the Land of Oz. Now, it is true that Dorothy can hardly be called a tourist—she never intended to fly that way in the first place, let alone land on the back of the Wicked Witch of the East! The only aim of her subsequent journey along the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City was to meet the Wizard of Oz and ask him to send her back to Kansas. The ultimate, conservative moral of Dorothy’s story is that “There’s no place like home!” Yet the search for a place to call home has much resonance for many “gay men,” a social identity used in the context of this book that has been embraced by Euro-American liberal political movements from the 1970s onward.

Heteronormativity underpins many gay men’s search for a home. Historically, North American, European, and Australasian nations-as-home and cities-as-home have operated as sites of heterosexism, sustained through both acts of governance and the social fabric. Consequently, the social and cultural lives of the homosexual constituted by Western thought have often retreated underground, becoming invisible (see Duberman, 1992). Similarly, the house-as-home, particularly the parental home, as a site of heteronormative socialization has often not been a safe place that validates gay men’s identities (Kirby and Hay, 1997). The parental home in particular often requires self-concealment and silence (Valentine, Skelton, and Butler, 2003). During the post–World War II years in the United States, gay men in part constructed their marginalized, concealed sexual subjectivities by coding themselves as “friends of Dorothy.” Judy Garland herself became a “camp” icon (Wright, 1999). The Land of Oz became a gay homeland, a source of origin and a place that substitutes for parental and societal acceptance. Here, even the horses had a rainbow hue. Initially, San Francisco became positioned in gay culture as the metaphorical Land of Oz, “the technicolor world over the rainbow where gays would finally find a home” (Wright, 1999:173). Yet, following the script of The Wizard of Oz, the desire of Dorothy is always to return. The promise of The Wizard of Oz is that even for those who make the return journey, home will also have changed and become more accepting.

Consequently, the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz and the fantasy homeland of Oz still resonate for many gay men in the twenty-first century. This is clearly illustrated by how The Wizard of Oz has directly inspired the names of all manner of gay travel-related companies, such as Rainbow Travel (New York, USA); Friends of Dorothy Travel (Sydney, Australia); Yellow Brick Road Travel Agency and Toto Tours (Chicago, USA); and Red Shoes Travel (California, USA). The use of Wizard of Oz–derived names for these businesses is not just because of the film’s cult status among many gay men. There is something that appeals to many oppressed groups in the story of Dorothy: her unhappiness in the family home, her sense of not really belonging, and her desire to go “somewhere over the rainbow . . . where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” After all, the search for a place “somewhere over the rainbow” may well be a key to understanding, at least in part, what has always sustained travel among many gay men. Socially constructed as “diseased,” “deviant,” or “degenerate,” the Western-constituted homosexual may imagine a place free from heteronormativity. By extension, contemporary commercial gay tourism operates, in part, by supplying access to such imagined homelands. These places are Oz-like sites of concentrated fantasy. At least this is one of the arguments we make in this book.

Although same-sex-attracted people have traveled for as long as different-sex-attracted people have, it is only in the past few decades that a globally integrated gay tourism industry has emerged. Consequently, this book investigates the emergence and impacts of a new set of tourism professionals. The gay tourism industry is constituted under the umbrella of new international and national lesbian and gay tourist organizations, an emerging global network of professionals including travel agents, marketing and distribution firms, providers of accommodation, tour wholesalers, and hospitality. The gay tourism industry itself has been central in (re)producing and circulating fantasies of homelands about places most sexual minorities including gay men have never visited, a transient home away from place of residence. For example, Sydney was positioned as the Emerald City and Australia as the Land of Oz in a recent gay guide:

Gay, queer, lesbian, poof, dyke—however you choose to identify . . . welcome to the Emerald City of Sydney in the fabled land of Oz and a month of simply fabulous events celebrating Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. (Pink Sydney, 2004)

Visiting imagined homelands offers gay men, just like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, an opportunity to reinterpret their origins and (re)establish their sexual identities (Reed, 2003). Gay identities, we argue, are in part constituted through fantasies of a homeland.

As our use of The Wizard of Oz suggests, metaphors of travel are often employed in contemporary Western gay cultures. For example, within the travelogue genre are recent titles including Hanns Ebensten’s Seals on the Icepack and More Gay Travel Adventures, Stan Persky’s Then We Take Berlin, and Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s edited collection titled Gay Travels; novels such as Con Anemogiannis’s Medea’s Children, John Lonie’s Acts of Love, David Leavitt’s Page Turner, and William Burroughs’s Queer; and autobiographies including Gary Wotherspoon’s Being Different and Robert Dessaix’s Mother’s Disgrace. Films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (director Stephan Elliott, 1994), Too Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar (director Beeban Kidron, 1995), and The Journey of Jared Price (director Dustin Lance Black, 2000) and songs such as “Smalltown Boy” (Bronski Beat), “Go West” (first recorded by the Village People and later released by the Pet Shop Boys), and “Somewhere” (which, although written for the musical West Side Story, has been embraced by Western same-sex cultures) all use travel in some way to give insight into the experiences of being a member of a sexual minority. Frequently, the travel is undertaken as a quest for a utopia, a place where one can be apparently “free” from heterosexism. Clearly, travel and, by extension, being a tourist have always been significant aspects in helping constitute contemporary Western gay culture. Mainstream popular culture now often reflects and normalizes the idea of gay males as perpetual tourists, for example, the appearance of “Gay and Away Tours” in the motion picture Under the Tuscan Sun (director Audrey Wells, 2003).

Even though references to gay tourism now feature in heterosexual popular culture, we argue that the oppressive qualities of heteronormativity are key for the relatively high level of mobility characterizing gay travel cultures of travel. In part our argument draws on the thesis developed by Brian Pronger in his book The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality and the Meaning of Sex (1990). Pronger argued that gay men are generally estranged or disenfranchised from the conventional form of heteromasculinity. Connell (1995) referred to this form as “hegemonic masculinity,” with its emphasis on aggression, competitiveness, and the idea that strength is based on an unwillingness to express emotions. We investigate this idea of estrangement based on “traditional” gendered subjectivities. We argue that many contemporary gay men adopt a conventional masculine identity but continue to be estranged and oppressed by heterosexism. Gay travel cultures have been and continue to be born from a social process whereby men seek out specific counterhegemonic places where they can discover or become themselves by their performativity of gender and sex roles.

This argument is not new. Devall (1979:188) made a similar point, arguing that there exists a “tradition of travel by gay men in search of themselves.” He noted the departure (often permanent or at least long term) of same-sex-attracted men from North America and northern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to countries such as Mexico, Morocco, Italy, and Greece. Even before an integrated, institutionalized gay tourism industry was established, a certain willingness to travel characterized same-sex-attracted men, particularly those with financial resources. Since the emergence of a gay tourism industry, opportunities to travel have generally been made much easier for those gay men with disposable incomes. Devall (1979:191) viewed the emergence and subsequent growth of gay travel as an extension of the “gay social worlds and gay culture [that developed] during the 1970s in North America.” He drew attention to the ways in which travel assisted in constituting gay subjectivities through assisting in the “coming out” process, providing opportunities to meet men in sexual and nonsexual settings, and bringing a heightened awareness of collectivism and political action through participation in Pride events.

Hughes (1997, 2000) and Pritchard et al. (2000), drawing upon a postmodern framework, investigated further the relationships between sexuality and travel. Pritchard, Sedgely, and Morgan (2000:267) argued that “the need for safety, to feel comfortable with like-minded people, and to escape heterosexism—often to specifically gay spaces—emerge as key influences on their [gay and lesbian] choice of holiday.” These intrinsic motivating factors of the need for escape, a sense of belonging, and the opportunity “to be oneself” are common across social groupings (Sharply, 1994). Yet, as Hughes (2000:224) argued, “[t]he significance of the holiday may be even more important for gay men than it is for many others in providing an opportunity, over an extended and continuous period of time, to be oneself.” This significance is increased for tourists who preferred to keep their sexuality concealed at “home.” Travel became positioned as a mechanism to escape the literal straitjacket of the everyday “closet.” Encountering different people and places opens up an in-between space in which to explore alternative sexual identities than those assumed in everyday lives and routines. Such encounters can have unintended consequences, depending on how Western gayness is constituted at the destination. The Euro-American gay-identified tourist may escape one straitjacket only to encounter the straitjacket of silence elsewhere (for example, see the discussion of Jamaica and Egypt in Chapter 4).

Some commentators have normalized all gay men as “natural travelers” (van Gelder and Brandt, 1992). However, as we argue elsewhere in this book, it is a mistake to conclude that all gay men can afford to travel and that their lifestyles are dominated by leisure and pleasure seeking. Badgett (1997) has challenged this widespread construction of gay men as “natural travelers.” She pointed out sampling flaws that biased respondents’ socioeconomic status. The homogenous, same-sex tourist categorized as “gay” is not an empirical reality. Indeed, we also argue that a level of “cultural capital” often remains necessary to confidently negotiate the particular counter-hegemonic social spaces found in many tourist destinations: the dance party, Pride parade, gay resort, nightclub, leather bar. It may well be the case that for some gay men, participation in gay tourism provides an opportunity to (re)access the importance of sexuality in their personal identity. For some it will be a life-changing event, and they may never return “home.” For others, it may enable a positive reassessment of their place of residence and their life in the “closet.”

Because many gay travel cultures are born from seeking an escape from heterosexism “back home,” less relevant are notions derived from the sociology of tourism that conceptualized tourism as a search for the authentic in “staged” and “pseudoevents” that provide a portal to the past (MacCannell, 1976). According to MacCannell, tourist motivations were shaped by the alienation and lack of authenticity created by modern industrial/urban life with its lack of spirituality and its dehumanizing characteristics of work within a Fordist production system. Instead, perhaps more germane for our purposes is Graburn’s (1977) analogy of tourism as a pilgrimage or, to use Graburn’s description, as a “sacred journey.” Such a conceptualization is based on the distinction between the profane, ordinary, stay-at-home life and the sacred, extraordinary, touristic life; in other words, it is a type of “ritual inversion” (Graburn, 1983; Cohen, 1988). Although secular displays may replace the religious rituals of Graburn’s analogy, we argue that, like the pilgrim, the gay tourist often seeks to experience “magic” that is “enhanced by group identity” (Graburn, 1989:34). We concur with Howe (2001) that same-sex tourism is like a pilgrimage, a quest for an individual and collective identity.

Gay Tourism in the Age of Mobility

Mobility, in its various forms, is emblematic of the twenty-first century as it unfolds (Franklin and Crang, 2001). Vast numbers of people continue to travel away from their homes temporarily (secure in the knowledge that natural disasters, epidemics, terrorist attacks, or plain old bad luck notwithstanding, they usually end up back at the place where they began their holiday). Indeed, in the late 1970s, in any given year less than one-hundredth of a percent of the world’s population took an international trip. By the late 1990s, this had increased to 1 percent of the world’s population. As academics, politicians, and other advocates of several world-travel organizations continue to tell us, tourism is now a significant factor in globalization, both economic and cultural, and is one of the largest global industries, perhaps employing more people than any other (Hall, 2003).

It will not, of course, be any surprise to learn that some of these tourists are gay men. Indeed, several Western national-, state-, and city-based tourism organizations target gay men, often employing consultants to conduct market research on the local economic significance of gay tourism. For instance, the Gay Travel Survey to the Greater Philadelphia Region was conducted by Community Marketing, Inc. (2003b) for The Greater Philadelphia Marketing Corporation, whereas in Australia, the Northern Territory’s Tourist Commission sponsored a series of seminars that included “Niche Marketing: Targeting Gay and Lesbian Travelers” (Hocking, 2002). In 1998, Tourism New South Wales sponsored the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Economic Impact Statement (Marsh and Levy, 1998). These documents provide marketing advice on how destinations can secure considerable economic benefits by increasing their share of this niche travel market, valued at an estimated US$54.1 billion in 2003 (Community Marketing, Inc., 2003a). Furthermore, these market research documents help construct gay tourists not only as natural travelers but also as economic saviors by referring to statistics that indicate they tend to take more international holidays per year than their heterosexual counterparts and that their average daily expenditure is also considerably greater than straight tourists. According to Community Marketing, Inc. (2001), 96 percent of gay tourists took holidays (the U.S. national average was 64 percent), and 83 percent had annual incomes higher than the U.S. average of US$40,000. Employing these figures, municipal authorities have sexualized cities through marketing campaigns. For example, in a 2004 gay tourism campaign, Philadelphia was positioned as “The City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection,” where gay tourists were encouraged to “Get your history straight and your nightlife gay” (Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, n.d.).

Mainstream media deemed gay tourism newsworthy given the sexual hysteria that in some instances occurred over the sudden refashioning of countercultures from “deviant” to “economic savior” and the new visibility of counterhegemonic city sites as “gay villages” in the competition for the “pink tourist dollar.” Since the late 1980s there have been literally hundreds of articles in the general press as well as in the tourism trade media concerning gay tourism. As of February 2004, gay tourism remained newsworthy, as Thomas Roth, president of Community Marketing, Inc., added the potential economic boosts and repackaging of San Francisco as the “gay honey-moon mecca” to the legal, moral, social, and political debates following the recognition of same-sex marriages in San Francisco by the newly elected mayor, Gavin Newsom (Alcantara, 2004). Sexual hysteria surrounding gay tourism is also present in the media and politics of many non-Western nations. For example, since 2001, in Egypt, heated debates in the Cairo media, al-Hayah and Middle East Report, followed the police raid of the floating discotheque Queen of the Nile and the trials of the Egyptian men arrested for offending Islam through their alleged participation in same-sex activities with Western tourists. In Egypt, as elsewhere, the sexual hysteria is related to the political, social, and moral effects that, in often highly heteropatriarchal societies, arise from the emergence and visibility of citizens who identify with Western-constituted lesbian and gay identities. A new “enemy,” the Western same-sex tourist, has breached the borders and the social order of the imagined heterosexual nation. Each 747 jumbo jet potentially brings “the enemy of the state.” Following Ibsen (1907), this is a person who exposes the hypocrisy of society. (See Chapter 4 for an analysis of this and similar incidents.)

In other nations, including Thailand, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Brazil, moral panic is fueled by the growth of sex tourism. The social uncertainty and economic chaos often associated with processes of globalization and the integration of these nations into the global economy have resulted in economic conditions in many non-Western nations that have sustained the growth of sex tourism, prostitution, and commercial sex premises. For example, the Internet site Moscow Gay Travel (2004) positions a trip to Russia as paradise for men seeking Russian “escorts” who are “barely eighteen” and recommends ways to find commercial teenage street workers along the Malecon, Havana, Cuba’s seafront promenade.

In post-Soviet nations of Central Europe, one inadvertent upshot of the transition to capitalism has been the huge growth in male sex work,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Mapping the Terrain of Gay Tourism
• Chapter 2. Charting the Emergence of Gay Tourism
• Chapter 3. Selling Gay Paradise: Spatial and Social Discourses of Gay Tourism Travelogues
• Chapter 4. Touring the Heterosexual Nation
• Chapter 5. Touring the Sexualized City
• Chapter 6. Special Events and Festivals
• Chapter 7. Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index